RICERCA ITALIANA     

DIGITAL PHILOLOGY: EDITIONS OF MEDIEVAL LATIN TEXTS

Università degli Studi di Siena

Abstract

This project is based on the experience of electronic editions of medieval texts enstablished in the years 2002-2003 with the first volume/cd-rom of the "Corpus of Latin rhythmical poetry", the production of the "philological" software DBR (Data-Base of Rhythms) and the editions of the first Norman historiographies: the research group plans now the publication of the volumes/cd-rom 2nd and 3rd, dedicated to the rhythmical inscriptions and to the musical poetry on the computus, and the preparation of the 4th (rhythmical hymns); the editon of further texts of the Norman courts in South-Italy; the inclusion of "artes dictandi" from XIII century and of pre-humanistic texts such as the "Zibaldone laurenziano" of Boccaccio. The results of the questions risen and the analisys of the different tecnichal and philological processes activated for the digital editions of such texts will be compared in a final seminar about the methods of digital philology of medieval texts, in dialogue between the scientific disciplines concerning the medieval texts and the developments of the computing humanities.

Principal Investigator

Francesco Vincenzo STELLA Università degli Studi di SIENA

Research Objectives

Aim of the research program is the achievement of a series of critical editions
of medieval Latin texts to be made on digital supports and by methods
connected to the computer technology. The project is based upon the
experience of the "Corpus of Latin rhythmical poetry", started in 1998 and
gone in 2004 as far as to publish 50 contributes in 2 volumes and to elaborate
a specific software in data.-base form (DBR, Data-Base of Rhythms), which
allows the publication of medieval texts and musics and of the reproductions of
all the manuscripts with a store of metrical, musical, linguistical and
paleographical informations which no printed edition would be capable to hold
and display. Thank to this software the digital edition of the first volume/cd-
rom, dedicated to rhythmical not-liturgical poetry, is forthcoming. For the
years 2004-2005 the units of Siena-Arezzo and Roma "la Sapienza" and their
collaborators abroad have planned the publication of the volumes 2nd and 3rd
(musicated rhythms on religious and astronomical computus and epigraphical
rhytms) and the preparation of the 4th (rhythmical hymns with music).
By the same way the second group of research units (Naples "Federico II" and
Naples "Suor Orsola Benincasa") began in 2002-2003 the digital edition of
texts on Norman history and aims to edit in the following biennium an edition-
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First Results

First stage:
purchasing of the required materials (books, cd-roms, eletronic equipment, reproductions of manuscripts) and organization of the meeting of the research group.Second stage;
preparatory studies both as articles and in volumes; demo-version of the electronic editions; definitive editions,both in volumes and on digital supports, of the musical-poetical, historic and literary texts announced by the project description.

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

COMPUTING PHILOLOGY
The debate on the use of the computer in humanistic disciplines remounts
already to the '70s and to the creation, in the '80s, of specialized journals such
as "Computing and Humanities", or "Calcolatori e Scienze Umane", and, in the
medievistic field, "Le médiéviste et l'ordinateur". Great part of this debate dealt
with systems or tools which today are by large overcome.
The studies of digital philology, in a sense still now topical, remount to the first
'90s, with the article of C.B. Faulhaber, Textual Criticism in 21st Century, e F.
Marcos Marin, Computers and text editing, in "Romance Philology" 1991, and,
in Italy, among other enterprises, the paper, then published in the
proceedings, of the conferences organized in Rome (University La Sapienza) by
Tito Orlandi, in Florence (Franceschini Foundation) by Claudio Leonardi and M.
Morelli of the IBM Foundation, in Verona (University) by Antonio De Prisco. A
specific European program has been dedicated to the history and metholodogy
of this field (AcoHum, AcoHum, Computing in humanities education: an
European perspective, 1999: results to be consulted at
www.hd.uib.no/AcoHum/ts). The use of electronic tools implies a radical
transformation in the conception of critical edition: this is no longer restricted -
as in the print publications - to the reconstruction of a >>>